Word: helfrich
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...History. Dutchmen without a home founded the Dutch Navy. They bequeathed to the Dutch sailors of Conrad Helfrich's day a tradition second to none for daring, seacraft and victory against great odds. They called themselves Les gueux de mer (Sea Beggars)-the Dutch corsairs who fled conquered Holland in the late 1500s, then harried Spanish shipping and once sailed a fleet inland across flooded fields to relieve beleaguered Leiden...
...Admiral Helfrich's veins runs the same sort of blood as that of the great Dutch naval heroes: Admiral Martin Harpertzoon Tromp, who fought the Spaniards and the British with equal ferocity and died with a British musket ball in his heart; his subordinate and student, Michel de Ruyter, whose conquering fleet once sailed up the Medway to within 30 miles of London; Vice Admiral Pieter Pieterzoon Hein, a splendid buccaneer who earned fame, plunder and death at the hands of Dunkirk pirates. These and other 17th-Century seadogs won for the Dutch the empire whose rich remnants Conrad...
...Fighting the Japanese first became Conrad Helfrich's serious study when he was a chubby cadet at Den Helder, the Royal Naval College in Holland. The curriculum was pointed at the Japanese, because even then the Dutch Navy expected that some day it would have to fight Japan in the Indies. Cadet Helfrich took this and all phases of his studies very seriously. He never excelled at anything except at working hard. He got good grades, but he never won prizes. He sailed small boats, but never won races. The other cadets seldom saw him lounging about the streets...
...about the same time (1907), the Navy was licking into shape a professional copy of Conrad Helfrich. That was Johannes Theodprus Furstner. An instructor at the academy said of them: "If war comes to Holland next time the world is set afire, I hope it comes before 1942, because Helfrich and Furstner will be admirals." Admiral Furstner is now Queen Wilhelmina's Naval Minister-in-Exile...
After Cadet Helfrich became an officer, the spirit of prophecy and offense both waxed within him. In the early 1920s, when he was teaching other young sprouts at Den Helder, his favorite lecture was on the coming war between the U.S. and Japan. "When?" his students would ask him, and he would boom: "In this generation." Then he would stride to a blackboard map and chalk three Xs- on Pearl Harbor, the Panama Canal, San Francisco. "There," he would say, "the attacks will fall...